BAJA DEMOCRATS
Cabo San Lucas, Baja California. The balcony view from a suite at the Marquis Los Cabos overlooking the Sea of Cortez is breathtaking. My wife Rebel and I are here attending a business conference – but at the moment, we are enjoying a margarita and a spectacular sunset in the ocean.
Ever-observant, Rebel notices that my eyes have become unfocused, and asks what I’m thinking about. "Nicholas Trist," I answer. "Who’s he?" she asks. "One of the great jerks of American history," I respond. She takes a sip of her margarita, gazes out upon the shimmering sheet of sunlit blue in front of us, and waits for the rest of the story.
Well, the story could begin with Cortez, the founder and creator of Mexico. The Aztec Empire he liberated in 1521 was about the size of Kansas, some 80,000 square miles. Over the next 200 years, viceroys appointed by the King of Spain expanded the colony of Nueva España, New Spain by twenty times (through appropriating land from Indian tribes) to 1,650,000 square miles.
When the French lost the Seven Years’ War, by the Treaty of Paris in 1763 they ceded their territory of Louisianne (named after Louis XIV) west of the Mississippi to England which awarded it to Spain for being England’s ally in the war. This added another 828,000 square miles to the Viceroyalty of New Spain.
When Napoleon seized power after the French Revolution, he wanted Louisianne back for France. So he made a secret deal in 1800 with the King Charles IV of Spain (actually with his wife Queen Maria Amelia and her lover Manuel de Godoy for Charles was retarded) to trade (a "retrocession") all of it for control of Tuscany in Italy. It was called the Treaty of Ildefonso.
Thomas Jefferson’s spies in Paris found out about the secret treaty in 1801, and that Napoleon needed some fast cash. He had lost his cash cow of Haiti and its sugar exports in a rebellion and might be open to a deal over Louisianne. The negotiations were concluded on May 2, 1803: 828,000 square miles for $15 million, or about three cents an acre. The Louisiana Purchase.
Charles IV abdicated his throne in 1808, in favor of his son Ferdinand VII, who was so pro-British/anti-French that Napoleon replaced him with his older brother Joseph Bonaparte as King of Spain. The people of Spain rebelled, which left the Spanish government in chaotic breakdown – and which gave the people of New Spain cause to rebel against their colonial rulers in Europe.
By the time Ferdinand VII regained the throne in 1814, he needed money to suppress the rebellion in New Spain. His government had challenged the legality of the entire Louisiana Purchase, claiming France had no right to sell it and never owned it anyway, since the secret Ildefonso treaty was invalid. President James Monroe saw the opportunity.
By 1819 at Monroe’s instructions, US Secretary of State John Quincy Adams concluded a deal with Ferdinand’s emissary Spanish Foreign Minister Luis de Onis called the Adams-Onis Treaty. The US paid Spain $5 million for the 70,000 square miles of Spanish Florida, and Spain recognized the validity of the Louisiana Purchase, thus settling the US-New Spain border.
Here’s the map of the treaty:
Ferdinand could now suppress the New Spain rebellion – but the general in charge of the suppression who was infamous for his brutality, Augustin de Iturbe (1783-1824), decided to rule New Spain for himself. In 1821, he made a deal with the rebels and declared himself Emperor Augustin I of now-independent New Spain, which he renamed Mexico. He promptly repudiated all treaties made by Spain – Adams-Onis in particular.
Hardly a year passed when a general of Iturbe’s army, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna (1794-1876) overthrew him. Years of coups, counter-coups, and chaos followed, with a full dozen Mexican states in open rebellion against the central government in Mexico City: Coahuila, San Luis Potosí, Querétaro, Durango, Guanajuato, Michoacán, Yucatán, Jalisco, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, Zacatecas, and Tejas.
Several of these states formed their own governments. All were brutally suppressed by Santa Anna. One succeeded in gaining independence – Tejas, which became in 1836 the Republic of Texas. Mexico demanded it back and warned the US if it annexed Texas, there would be war.
When James Polk (1795-1849) became president in March of 1845, he promptly moved to accept Texas into the Union, which is it was that December. In 1846, the Mexican government was such a chaotic mess that it had four presidents, six war ministers, and 16 finance ministers – in that one year.
Nonetheless, it got what it said it wanted when 2,000 Mexican soldiers attacked 63 US soldiers on a border patrol at the Neuces River, killing 11, and the Mexican-American War was on.
By March of 1847, US forces had secured most of northern Mexico. Then General Winfield Scott landed 12,000 soldiers at Veracruz – among whom were Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and Thomas Jackson, later to be nicknamed "Stonewall."
After securing Veracruz, Scott marched to Mexico City to defeat the forces of Santa Anna – who had by now seized the Mexican presidency for the sixth time – at the Battle of Chapultepec on September 13, 1847. The war was over. Now the terms of surrender and relinquishing of Mexican territory had to be negotiated.
Polk sent the State Department’s chief clerk, Nicholas Trist, to negotiate the terms. It was a bizarre choice. From Charlottesville, Virginia, he had managed to marry Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughter, Virginia Jefferson Randolph. This connection enabled him to become Andrew Jackson’s private secretary, and from that to be named US Consul in Havana, Cuba in 1833.
Trist was fanatically pro-slavery – and corrupt. Spanish slavers in Cuba put him on their payroll to forge documents covering up illegal sales of Africans into slavery. In 1839, captured West African slaves on the Spanish ship La Amistad sailing out of Havana to a Cuban plantation broke free, gained control of the ship, tried to sail back to Africa and got captured by the US Navy.
The owner of La Amistad paid Trist to forge documents saying the slaves were Cuban-born, which was legal, not African, which was illegal as the slave trade by then was banned. A Congressional investigation revealed Trist’s corruption, he was recalled – but not fired – and the Supreme Court in a famous trial in 1841 set them free to return to Africa.
Steven Spielberg tells the story in his 1997 film Amistad (starring Morgan Freeman and Anthony Hopkins) – but there is no mention of Trist.
Rather than imprisoned, Trist through his friendship with Andrew Jackson was made chief clerk at State. Polk was close to Jackson, so maybe that connection is what prompted Polk to send him to Mexico City. It was a decision he was to regret.
When Trist arrived, General Winfield Scott was military governor of Mexico City, the Mexican government existed in name only, and many a US Congressman and Senator was demanding the US annex the entire country of Mexico.
Polk turned this demand down. He instructed Trist to inform Santa Anna that he upheld Mexican independence, that he wanted to end the US military occupation, that Mexico was to relinquish any claim to the territory of Texas and the Louisiana Purchase, that Mexico was to grant the US transit rights across the Isthmus of Tehauntepec (the "waist" of Mexico 125 miles wide between the Caribbean and Pacific), and that Mexico was to cede to the US its territory between the western border of the US (meaning Texas and the "Missouri Territory" of the Purchase) and the Pacific Ocean.
The last meant, most importantly, California – all of it, Alta or Upper California and Baja or Lower California.
Trist made some headway, but Polk soon realized he had made a mistake. When informed that the Mexicans refused to grant the transit rights and cede Baja California, he recalled Trist and ordered him to return to Washington. Incredibly Trist refused – he overtly disobeyed the order of the President of the United States.
Trist then quickly gave in to the Mexican demands. No transit rights. He agreed to a border from El Paso, Texas to the junction of the Colorado and Gila Rivers (near what is now Yuma, Arizona), then in a straight line to the Pacific below San Diego Bay. All of Baja California was to remain part of Mexico.
He and his Mexican counterparts formally signed the treaty on February 2, 1848 at the basilica of Guadelupe in the village of Hidalgo on the outskirts of Mexico City – thus it’s known as the Treaty of Guadelupe-Hidalgo. Trist presented it to Polk as a fait accompli.
Although Polk immediately fired Trist and refused to pay him, he wanted an end to the whole affair. 525,000 square miles added to the US would have to be enough, without Baja’s additional 30,000. So Polk accepted the treaty which the Senate then ratified on March 10.
And ever since, Mexicans have demanded the treaty be renounced.
In the entrance foyer of the Museo Nacional de Historia, the Museum of National History in Mexico City, there is an enormous mosaic map depicting Mexico Integral – Greater Mexico, Mexico Integrated and Whole. Every class of students on a field trip from their school to the museum is made to sit down and gaze up at the huge map, while the teacher explains how so much of Los Estados Unidos was stolen from Mexico and really belongs to them.
Every Mexican schoolchild is taught that just as all the treaties signed by Spain ceding territory to the US are illegal, so is the Treaty of Guadelupe-Hidalgo. Every Mexican national legally or illegally in the US is told by the Mexican government his or her allegiance is to Mexico – not America.
Thus we have the rise of the Reconquista movement by such groups as Aztlan, La Raza, and MEChA. Thus we have 20 million illegal aliens in the US from Mexico, waving signs like this:
And thus we have Democrats who aid and abet them, who could care less about their threat to US security and sovereignty if it helps keep them in power.
We could call them Baja Democrats. We should think of them as Nicholas Trists. Principles that are depraved. Corrupt to the core. Always willing to appease America’s enemies, always willing to sell America out.
Baja has over 2,000 miles of spectacular coastline. Can you imagine what it would be like today – what its real estate would be worth – if it were part of America and not Mexico? That difference in value – in negative value, what it’s worth now compared to what it would be – is the same difference Democrats make. They are of negative value.
They destroy potential. They’d rather have power than get out of the way and thereby enable prosperity. They bring nothing of positive value. They are just in the way.
Other than these pockets of paradise like the Marquis los Cabos made possible by American money and American tourists, Baja is still an uninhabited wasteland. Such a waste of what could have been. This land is an appropriate symbol for Baja Democrats.